Selected Exhibition Statements and Reviews 

Vessels - Carriers of Meaning, Fabric of Space

An excerpt from my Artist's Statement for exhibition at the Gallery de Boer, Owen Sound, Ontario (2006)

The theme of Vessels is inexhaustible with connotations of ritual, ceremonial, symbolic, sensual or spiritual elements. Vessels can stand alone or be grouped with others. They can be full or empty, whole or broken, plain or decorated, designed for utilitarian purposes or purely for aesthetic appeal. Despite these various purposes and possibilities, vessels suggest a sense of stability in the familiarity that we have with them. Simple primitive vessels often refer to domesticity and daily rituals while ornately decorated vessels of gold or fine porcelain imply abundance, opulence, ceremony and occasion. There is a strong connectedness with human existence and purpose in life. Even the human form itself metaphorically conveys the notion of a vessel.

John Harrison, with Ron de Boer, wrote the following Gallery Notes:

"Women, womb men, are vessels of life itself, vessels of nurture and nutriment, carriers through time, carriers of times, vessels of hope and sorrow, grace and meaning. Women make meaning.

Vessels of memory and imagination, women practice art, like many things, differently. Women tend to see and feel the world and its experience as a fabric, rather than as fragments. Women are often key vessels of values and continuity.

A Zen saying reveals the meaning of the vessels is not its clay body but the empty space it is in essence, to be filled, to serve its purpose and its pleasure. An artist begins with an empty space on canvas and fills that vessel with their meanings, rich and varied, carried to those who come within its measure. All of these spaces are part of one space.

Our consciousness occupies space while we are in this world, and our imagination reaches out through space and shares in the imaginative commons we all meet in when we can. Women have a special understanding and gift of giving. Vessels of imagination are at our core, helping us all carry the essential elements of life, on our migration through life . . ."

2 Escarpments – sensuality  
Gotlandska Konstnarer, Gotland, Sweden, and the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario (1992 / 1993)

A travelling exhibition entitled 2 Escarpments, connected ten artists from Gotland, Sweden and Owen Sound, Canada with exhibitions at Foreingen Gotlandska Konstnarer and the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery. These exhibitions focused on the similarities between the respective escarpments in Gotland and the Bruce Peninsula. In an article by Mary Baxter, reviewing the exhibition at the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, she said: “Cynthia Porter and Asa Kedja seem to form the bridge between the two groups. Both of these artists explore their personal responses to the escarpments.” She described my work as “earth-toned lines of colour swirling around a vortex of spirals to convey feelings of the escarpment as a sensual enclave of colour and shape unencumbered by social or intellectual constructions.”  The work for this exhibition, Metaphysical Leap, was on six sheets of 300 pound Arches paper creating one image. The medium was collaged Japanese papers (Washi) and watercolours.

Stories of the Land – journey
Teodora Fine Art Gallery in Toronto, Ontario (1995)

Another exhibition, Stories of the Land, was initially shown at Teodora Gallery in Toronto. In this body of work I used antique maps, paint, and Washi, to imply a story. The contrast between the fragility of these papers and their hidden strength and durability fascinated me. Using maps and mixed media allowed me to explore the relationship between space and intimacy. They suggested to me the excitement of an unfamiliar journey or the security of a familiar one, a physical or spiritual expedition. In a review in Artword, Holly Briesmaster describes these paintings as follows: 

“The artist … has thinly covered antique maps of countries and whole provinces with layers of other paper (Japanese Washi) and of paints (acrylic, florescent), yielding surreal and ambiguous effects. The Department of the Interior (Manitoba) is a striking instance. A warm wash bathes, erodes and erases as it overlays the former map. The result looks both earthily intimate and aerially remote, and, as Porter herself writes, figurative and abstract. The colours are lyrical – plum, gold and peach – and the forms confidently abstract while able also to be read as, perhaps, hill and shore. Then a tactile element comes in on closer view, as the loose laminations suggest fabric and skin. Skin of the earth, in fact, tattooed and scraped, half desolated by those who initially cut in their presumptive survey lines. And on a map of British Columbia the shape of the province, flesh-toned, reappears as torso. In all, a haunting, subtle blend of the conceptual and the sensual.”

Incense-filled Vessels - spirituality

While land formations influence my creative expression this is not the only inspiration for my eclectic body of work. While studying art history at Georgian College, I became aware of Wassily Kandinsky’s work and his theories On the Spiritual in Art published in 1912 and I also read An Art of Our Own: the Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art by Roger Lipsey. Something resonated as I read these books while searching for my own visual language. Many years later I began a series on vessel shapes after my daughter gave me a book on collecting antique perfume bottles. Around the same time I heard a speaker on the topic of prayer and meditation, and she mentioned from Revelation “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” The idea of golden bowls filled with incense evolved and I began the series of Incense-filled Vessels. These primitive vessel shapes, exhibited at several art galleries in Ontario,  provided a vehicle for also considering “figure and ground, substance and atmosphere, line and texture, assertion and reticence.”  

The Ultimate Witness – feminism  
Homer Watson Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario (1995)

The Ultimate Witness, was inspired from required reading in a Women’s Studies course, Women in the Christian Tradition, at the University of Western Ontario. One segment of the course was on early Christian women martyrs and so a series of Collage and Mixed Media works were created with spiritual and feminist overtones. Of these works, first exhibited at the Homer Watson Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario, I wrote:

For a period of three hundred years, from 66 to 313 AD, the early Christian Church experienced persecution at the hands of Roman Emperors. While studying this historical period I was impressed by the courage and conviction of the women martyrs. They believed that martyrdom was the “ultimate witness” of their faith and were willing to suffer and die rather than denounce their beliefs. I felt compelled to acknowledge their commitment and idealism, for it was in death that these women achieved autonomy within an entrenched patriarchal society. They were treated as brutally as the men during their inquisition, torture, and punishment, and no concessions were made because of their gender or age. Their names (the titles of the works) and the stories intrigued and challenged me.

The cross, which may seem irrelevant to many people today, is a complex symbol, which neither denies nor supplants the historical meaning in Christianity. This symbol affirms the primary relationship between the supernatural and earthly worlds. Because of the horizontal, which cuts across the vertical, it universally stands for the conjunction of opposites connecting the spiritual and the earthly, hence its significance as a symbol for agony, struggle, and martyrdom. In each work the negative space between the four units forms a cross, separating light from darkness, or as persecution and hope in an eternal future. Within the collage, fragments of maps and dress patterns imply a journey, physical or spiritual, or directions to follow in pursuit of a destination or goal.